Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Americans Snap Up Guns at Wal-Mart, Ammo Clips on eBay

With President Barack Obama endorsing sweeping gun restrictions in
the wake of the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, prices for
handgun magazines are surging on EBay and semi-automatic rifles are sold
out at many Wal-Mart Stores Inc. locations. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, said yesterday that it would
continue to sell guns, including rifles like the one used at Newtown,
where 26 people, most of them children, were killed on Dec. 14. By
contrast, Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. suspended sales of similar guns at
its more than 500 stores. Searches of five kinds of semi-automatic rifles on Wal- Mart’s
website showed them to be out of stock at stores in five states,
including Pennsylvania, Kansas and Alabama. Wal-Mart doesn’t sell guns
online, instead asking customers to input a zip code to see if their
local store carries a specific weapon. On EBay, the auction website, shoppers have recently bid up gun
magazines. The current bid for four Glock handgun magazines, ammunition
for one of the guns used at Newtown, is $118.37 compared with $45 on the
day before the shooting. The bid for seven Glock magazines hit $201
Dec. 17 from $71.01 before the massacre. Gun buyers have flooded other firearms retailers too. The Hyatt Gun
Shop in Charlotte, North Carolina, racked up more than $1 million in
sales Tuesday for the best single-day performance since the store opened
in 1959, according to Justin Anderson, director of online sales. At the
top of shoppers’ lists was the Bushmaster AR-15, the model of rifle
used at Newtown that sells for as much as $4,000 and had almost sold
out, he said...more